𝐁𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐭 𝐋𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐌𝐞

47|| Fears

Celeste // February 27
•••

"I have a fear of death."

I blink up at Dante as the words settle in my brain.

"Really?" I ask with interest, but then immediately realize it's the wrong thing to say. "I mean.. ehm.. that's inconvenient for you."

He stares at me for a moment before a smile cracks his face. "It is." He nods along his words as his fingers trail to the tape on my face again. "Can I peel this off?"

"Yes."

Immediately he starts the process, being gentle and slow until the first tape that held my skin back is ripped loose. He tosses it aside, moving on to the next one.

"Why are you scared of death?"

He stays silent for a long time, until he'd relieved my face off all the sticky tapes I'd put on it and just when I thought he'd ignore my question, he answers, "I lost someone very close to me when I was a kid, and ever since I.. don't know, I guess it just always stuck with me."

A feeling awfully close to protectiveness washes over me at the knowledge that something made him sad. Suddenly, I wish death was a living being just so I could torture them for ever daring to take something from him.

I take his hand in mine, squeezing it ones to show comfort before letting go.

The motion seems to relax him and relieves the stiffness in his shoulders that had settled there after his confession.

He slowly starts raising the wet washcloth to my face again and I look at it with an unsure expression.

He told me about his fear, so I can tell him about mine.

"I.. I'm scared of water."

I'd never said the words out loud before, fearing that admitting it to someone would only cause more damage, confusion and fear inside me. But the opposite happened, because when I told Dante it felt like a weight had been lifted off of me.

He holds my chin, stroking my jaw with his thumb in comforting circles as the warm cloth makes contact with my face.

"Why?"

I'd asked myself the same question over and over, through years and years, yet I could never find a reasonable answer.

Like Tobias had said, my fear was irrational.

But even when I knew it was irrational, I still couldn't understand why no one understood my terror right away.

Nobody thought it was weird to be scared of spiders or lightning or injections. Because those things looked scary, they didn't create life like water did and they weren't an essential part of survival.

They weren't the home of millions of animals, they didn't get prayers to fall out of the sky and they didn't fill up lakes and oceans that people loved and cherished.

And that's the thing that caused my deep rooted fear of water: the fact that it could be the cause of so much destruction and so much life all at ones.